Biking Uphill Is Satisfying, and Other Bicycle Research From TRB 2013

Today is Day Three of the Transportation Research Board’s annual conference. Interested in pavement composition and performance? There are 200 workshops with your name on them.

Bring transportation officials from your hometown to Copenhagen to gawk at all the "non-fat non-motorists." Photo: ##http://blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/2010/05/07/should-bicycle-lanes-be-abolished/##Crikey##

Interested in bicycling? There’s quite a bit for you too. Yesterday, 13 scholars presented their research on cycling. Here are a few highlights:

Take Your City Engineer to Copenhagen. Cortney Mild of the University of Oregon studied the impact of study trips led by Bikes Belong and FHWA to cycling cities in Europe [PDF], showing policymakers and transportation professionals the potential of better infrastructure. They found that the tour participants were overwhelmed at the sheer number of cyclists and the “normalcy” of it in everyday life, with people of all ages, athletic abilities, genders, and economic statuses getting on bikes.

Dave Cieslewicz, former mayor of Madison, realized that the Netherlands achieved high rates of cycling not just “because the price of gas is so high and the land is flat,” but “by making conscious decisions about bicycle infrastructure and policies.” He said that what “hit [him] over the head” was that the U.S. “can make conscious policy decisions that dramatically change the mode share.”

The most common improvement these participants implemented in their home towns upon returning was colored pavement to call attention to complicated intersections. But they also returned excited about opportunities to build cycle tracks.

Connectivity Does In Fact Boost Mode Share. Jessica Schoner of the University of Minnesota found that bike route connectivity was a significant factor in increasing mode share in the the 74 U.S. cities she studied – but, surprisingly, “fragmentation” is not. I asked if fragmentation wasn’t just the lack of connectivity. She said fragments were “little islands of bike facility everywhere.” The size of the bicycle network was also not a significant factor in mode share, according to her research.

The Mineta Transportation Institute studied this issue recently, looking at high-stress and low-stress streets for biking in San Jose. They found that while 67 percent of the city’s streets were “low-stress,” that didn’t help if, to get between them, you have to risk your hide on wide, arterial streets with speeding traffic.

Schoner also found that households with seniors or children were far less likely to ride bikes. I suppose this isn’t shocking, but it is disheartening. She said parents often have “more complex trip-chaining needs” and she’d hoped greater connectivity would ameliorate that problem some, but it didn’t appear to.

Biking Uphill Is Satisfying. It’s an established fact that cyclists rate their commute as more “satisfying” than others.

Researcher Devon Paige Willis from Montreal’s McGill University surveyed more than 5,600 students about their travel behavior [PDF], and 268 of them rode bicycles (three times Montreal’s average mode share of 2 percent). People who rode out of an environmental conviction or health goal were more satisfied than those looking for just a convenient commute. Willis calls it the “halo effect” – the satisfaction that comes from living your values.

The built environment also had a big effect, with population density having the highest impact on bike mode share. “We hypothesized that land use would impact it,” Willis told me, “that parks and residential areas would end up with people being more satisfied.” But those factors weren’t nearly as significant as population density. Cyclists like an interesting ride, Willis told me, with lots of people around and lots of activity. She said the traffic congestion often associated with high population density didn’t seem to drag down the satisfaction level.

Another surprise is that hillier commutes were more satisfying.

“It’s not intuitive and it’s something we have not entirely explained,” Willis said. “My personal hypothesis is that because cyclists are cycling a lot of the time for exercise and health, the slope is not an inhibitor to them.”

That would indicate to me that “satisfaction” is not necessarily the same as “enjoyment.” However, the 58 students who said they biked year-round found their commute less satisfying than those who only rode in good weather.

To Promote Cycling, Emphasize Its Convenience, Not Just Creating More “Non-Fat Non-Motorists.” So should the pitch for people to start cycling be all about the “halo effect”? Maria Börjesson of the Centre for Transport Studies at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm studied the ways cycling is promoted. She found that campaigns emphasize those “halo effect” benefits – health, environment – which are indirect effects of cycling, to the exclusion of biking’s direct effects.

“Rather than invoking positive effects on travel costs and travel times – as planners would do for other modes of transport – cycling measures are often motivated by reduced negative externalities of car traffic,” she found. “It silently presupposes that the cycle’s advantages in itself, as a mode of travel, are not enough to make it competitive. Moreover, the ‘indirect effects’ argument disregards cyclists as travelers. Cyclists are only important to the extent that they have become ‘non-fat non-motorists.’”

Notably, when Börjesson talks about planners invoking the health benefits of cycling, she means they emphasize the health of the population, not the individual. Therefore, she sees the arguments made for cycling being discriminatory against cyclists, as if their motivations should all be generalized toward the common good and not simply their own convenience of a quicker, smoother, cheaper trip.

Australians Are Wusses About the Cold. Professor Geoffrey Rose of Monash University found that in Australia, daily bike commuters tend to ride less in the winter, while more casual cyclists will usually keep biking at their normal rate, presumably able to find a few nice days each week to ride. Granted, this research [PDF] was done in Melbourne, Australia, where winters are mild. “In Denmark, they’ll cycle through three feet of snow,” Rose told me. “In Australia, if it looks like it’s going to rain, people pull the plug.”

Casual cyclists in Rose’s study were 2.3 times more likely than committed ones to use a private automobile as their backup mode in bad weather, while committed cyclists rode transit as their backup. The upshot, Rose said, is that if the goal is to reduce miles driven, “we have to figure out what we can do to support casual cyclists.”

Of course, weather isn’t the only factor that helps a casual cyclist decide whether any given day will be a bicycle day. Activities planned before or after work, the need to carry a lot of items, the clothes required for work, and the availability of other modes are also factors – not to mention the not-insignificant issue of whether they feel like it.

On the issue of biking uphill, it may be more satisfying, but I can tell you from personal experience you’re less likely to actually do it. I just recently moved from the top of a hill 3 miles from work to a pretty level stretch of land about 5 miles from my work, and I bike at least 5 times more often now than I used to. Every time, I’ll take the less satisfying route that doesn’t discourage me and most other people from riding regularly.

Anonymous

Nah… *having* biked uphill is satisfying! 🙂

Davistrain

If biking uphill is “satisfying”, why does the “gold standard town” for “bike friendliness” in California, the city of Davis, have the general topography of a billiard table?

shane phillips

Davistrain– because when you have to bike uphill to get anywhere, only the people who really LOVE biking do it.

AM

Personally, I find my urban commute in DC to be much more satisfying on days with heavily congested traffic – while everyone else stews in their bumper-to-bumper cars, I get to speed by in the bike lane, unimpeded! It’s not unusual for me to pass 40 or 50 cars over the course of my 20 mile ride. There is definitely satisfaction to be had in “beating the system”.

AM

Edit to previous: *2 mile ride. 20 would be a little much, even for me!

huskerdont

If you like a physical challenge, then you might like biking up hill. If you don’t like physical challenges, it might not be your thing. I love me some hills.

Erik Griswold

From the paper by Ms. Mild:
When reviewing San Francisco’s request for an exception, the state staff person argued “if a bicyclist fell, every bicyclist behind him would crash and the cyclists in the lane would be trapped”. Smith explained, “That’s just not how it functions. People have brakes, or they can check and weave into the traffic lane if needed”, plus “the posts are spaced 30 feet apart”. San Francisco was finally allowed to build the facility because the city traffic engineer justified the logic and signed in approval. Nevertheless, vehicular cyclists challenged the City and are theoretically “still waiting to sue”.
So, as we can see, the greatest enemies to bicycle mode share are the Dinosaur Road Engineers and the Vehicular Cycling Cult.

Briliant!

Nicolas Fourie

I cycle to work Mon – Fri. Although I am hesitant about riding in the rain as I carry my. Laptop in my backpack along with my headphones and my cellphone. It looked like it was gonna rain today but I decided to go anyway. I wrapped my bag in my rain jacket and packed in some plastic packets so my laptop would’nt get wet. But as I was on my way a collegue from work offered me a lift, so I decided to catch a lift with him as he said it was raining heavily his side of town.

I bought my bike as an incentive to save money as petrol is expensive. I would ride on all the good days but if it rained or if I didn’t feel like it I’d take the car. Last year my car was stolen outside the office at my workplace, so now my bicycle is my only way to get around except if someone offers me a lift if its raining. But I hate asking for lifts, I like my independence. I enjoy riding uphill, cause there’s often a downhill when I’m over the top.

I wish they’d make more lanes for cyclists here in South Africa. I like my bike!

There is so much research on bicycles, there could be a couple more posts on this topic, thanks for covering it a bit here Tanya. Here’s some work that Portland State University published on the topic of bicycle signals http://www.its.pdx.edu/upload_docs/1354724032.pdf
The Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices (published by the USDOT and Federal Highway Administration still doesn’t allow them, but there are 16 cities in North America that have applied them.

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

Copenhagen is famous for being a city where a lot of people bike. But for years the bike commuting rate has remained roughly steady at just over a third of trips. Then last year the city’s bike commute mode share increased from 36 percent to 41 percent. Meanwhile, driving declined 3 percent as a share of […]

Copenhagen is famous for being a city where a lot of people bike. But for years the bike commuting rate has remained roughly steady at just over a third of trips. Then last year the city’s bike commute mode share increased from 36 percent to 41 percent. Meanwhile, driving declined 3 percent as a share of […]

From around the Network today: Copenhagen, Aspirational City: With all the progress being made on cycling in American cities, we still have places like Copenhagen to remind us how far we have to go, says Andy Clarke at the League of American Bicyclists blog. The city just released its bi-annual Bicycle Account [PDF], and it […]

Copenhagen, Denmark is not a natural bicycling city. In the early 1960’s it was very much of a car town. In 1962 the city created its first pedestrian street, the Stroget, and every year since then Copenhagen has allocated more and more of its public space to bicycles, pedestrians and people who just want to sit […]

Around the Streetsblog Network today: Bike Shops Get People Cycling: Greater Greater Washington posted a great video this weekend on the importance of neighborhood bike shops, particularly in low-income communities, to encouraging people to bike regularly. In the video, Milwaukee Bicycle Works Director Keith Holt explains that if children from an impoverished community can’t access […]